


It's Peaceful In the Deep

by ACommonAnomaly (RowanBaines)



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Family, First Age, Gen, Grief, Just typical First Age stuff, Kindness does not equal weakness, Like in canon there is no happy ending, Loss, Maglor as seen through the eyes of Maedhros, Siblings, Suicide, This is sad stuff guys, Trauma, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:36:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24312880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowanBaines/pseuds/ACommonAnomaly
Summary: Makalaurë’s spirit may be the most like our mother’s, but he has our father’s keen-edged intellect and his heart burns with all of our father’s fire.Maglor as seen through the eyes of his brother, Maedhros.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 51





	It's Peaceful In the Deep

**Author's Note:**

> When it comes to depictions of Maglor I've seen lots of extremes, which I am not at all fond of because I see him as something in between. My Maglor is a complex person capable of both kindness and fiery intensity, though sadly tenderness is often out of place in war-time situations.
> 
> Please read the tags, this is not a happy story.

Makalaurë’s spirit may be the most like our mother’s, but he has our father’s keen-edged intellect and his heart burns with all of our father’s fire.

Makalaurë was just a toddler when I caught my first glimpse of his softness. He was squatting down beneath a row of sunflowers in the garden when he spotted a caterpillar climbing up his sleeve. It was a small fuzzy thing, but I suppose he thought it spiky and strange, for in his fear he shook it off and stomped it into the dirt.

Saddened by the needless destruction of the creature, I explained to him what it was, and that it would have become a butterfly one day if he hadn’t killed it.

He repented of his action, then, heaving with great sobs as he scooped the caterpillar into his hands. He carried it to Amil, weeping bitterly the whole way, and she scolded me for upsetting him. But we were to learn that that was just Makalaurë. He wept when on a hike our father shot a hare for our supper. Even once fully grown, he wept, though more quietly, over finding a young bird that had fallen from its nest and died.

Yet I never considered him weak, for all his gentle nature.

Makalaurë has always felt things strongly. The first time he fancied himself in love he threw himself with abandon into courtship, and when it came to naught, he plunged into a despair that we feared would consume him.

And his temper! Anger blazes high and hot in my gentlest brother, all the more violent because he lets it stew long before it finds expression. Whenever he stood in the aftermath of his fury, he saw with remorse the dangers of uncontrolled emotions, and he knew that he must keep a tighter rein on his feelings.

That is how he learned to control and channel his emotions. Outbursts became rare as the years went by, and, being a safe outlet, his music became vibrant and moving.

During the kinslaying at Alqualondë, many facets of my brother’s rich character flashed in turn, though I saw it most clearly in retrospect, being at the time caught up in the task of staying alive.

I watched as Makalaurë seemed to collapse in on himself when someone near us took a spear to his thigh and fell, crying out in pain and fear. There was something like heartbreak in his eyes, chased by terror, as arrows rained down on us, bringing death to those who had so loyally followed us. Then it seemed to dawn on him that this was real, not something he was merely watching, but something he was participating in, and that any of us might die.

He stayed close at my side and fought hard, though the first time his blade cut into a body I thought he would be sick.

I thought I would be sick, too.

Something snapped closed inside him after that. Though he had learned to control his emotions, he then became even more remote, the pain of what he had seen and done becoming too much for him to carry with him without emotional armor.

We all coped in different ways. Though Makalaurë’s voice had not been heard in song since before our grandfather’s death, after Alqualondë Makalaurë began to compose again. I overheard some among my followers claim that it was the hardness of his heart that allowed him to make art out of something still so raw and fresh.

The idea of Makalaurë’s heart being hard was absurd to me, but curiosity drove me to question my brother about it, to understand his inner workings.

“I feel sick at heart. But it is better that I pour this sorrow into song rather than let it fester and poison my dreams,” Makalaurë said, clutching his lap harp with whitened knuckles. “If I distance myself, then I can examine it…try to understand what happened. I need to understand. And even if I cannot reach understanding, I must find some closure and put it behind me so that I can continue to move forward. I feel...if I stop swimming, I will surely drown.”

His voice shook and he turned his head away from me. I realized he was crying, and my heart sank because this was the first time in our lives that he hid his tears from me.

He would hide them again when Atar died, though we would cling to each other for comfort. And he would barely hold them back the first time he saw me after my rescue from Thangorodrim, trying so hard to be strong for me. It occurred to me during the long days of my recovery that each misfortune seemed to drive my brother’s gentle nature deeper within him where he could protect it from the harsh reality of war.

Some may indeed have thought that part of him was lost, but it was to preserve that part of himself that he built such protections around himself. Had I not been so hardened by my own experiences, I would have tried to draw him out.

But we caught glimpses of it, of his tenderness, when he tended to the wounded and comforted the grieving.

Still, each battle seemed to harden him a little more, strengthening the defenses he had built around himself, and defeat especially left its mark on him. 

Then came the Nirnaeth Arneodad.

I stood stunned while the allies Carnistir had secured turned on us, cutting a path through my people to get at me. Makalaurë understood the situation quicker than I did, seeing the betrayal and acting swiftly. He slew Uldor, tearing into the traitor with a cry of rage that made those near him flinch away.

His voice rose in a battle song, into which he poured all of his anger, all of his hatred for those who fought on behalf of the Dark Tyrant. The strength of it carried us forward and hardened our hearts for the battle, and we fought like ones possessed. Blood spilled all around us, and we reached with desperate hands toward victory.

It was not to be. So many of us fell. Too many.

We retreated from the fight broken in spirit, our faces wet with blood and tears. When we briefly stopped to rest, Makalaurë turned his back to me to survey the carnage, and his shoulders shook.

These tears were not for me.

Makalaurë became more closed off than I had ever seen him as we gathered the remnants of our followers and struggled to survive. He hunted, bringing back food for us, and when we came upon enemies, he fought with a quiet fierceness that was eerie to behold.

Had I not been so consumed by my own misery, weighed down by the immensity of our defeat, I would have worried that I had truly lost the brother I had known and loved.

At Doriath I thought our grief would overwhelm us, though in different ways. 

Telvo and Pityo seemed to be in shock and retreated from us to comfort each other on their own. I focused on the little bit of good I might be able to do and searched for the two children who had been so heartlessly abandoned in the woods by servants of one of my fallen brothers.

Makalaurë…I found him holding Carnistir’s body. I was so consumed by my own desperate errand that I did not realize at first that Makalare teetered on the edge. In a confused ramble I explained about the children and urged him to get up and help me. I couldn’t look at Carnistir’s face, pale and serene in death.

Makalaurë had snapped at me, and at those near us, “Leave me, damn you! I do not care!”

Some may have took to heart his words, and thought him cold. But I saw the trembling of his hands where he clutched our brother, and the mist over his eyes. Once again, He would not let his tears fall where I could see, and he dipped his head so that his hair fell over our brother’s face like a dark veil.

These tears were not for me. He shed them for our fallen brothers before he pushed his churning pain deep down. In my absence, he called upon the strength of his emotional shields so that he could get up and deal with the aftermath of the battle.

At the havens of Sirion, I was worried that Makalaurë’s apparent weariness would make him slow, that he would be cut down as Turko, Curvo, and Moryo had been at Doriath. I was so worried for him, so intent on protecting him during the fighting, that I was stunned into stillness after the battle when I learned that both of the twins had fallen. I had worried so for Makalaurë, but it was Pityo and Telvo who fell.

I was still in shock when he found me sitting with our youngest brothers. He said something about twins, and I irritably shook my head.

“We cannot leave them alone in this ruined place. Nelyo, look at me,” he had said.

His voice grated on my nerves. It threatened to drag me out of a memory of Ambarussa that I had plunged myself into. I had wanted to wave him away, but my hand was holding a hand cold and sticky with drying blood, and I could not let go.

I hadn’t even looked at him when I said, “I do not care. Do as you will.”

It was not until some days later that I caught a glimpse of Makalaurë’s grief as he lay on his bedroll, the two elflings sleeping in the curve of his body. He had buried his face in the crook of his arm, the other arm resting over the sleeping children, and his body shook though I heard no sound. I had turned away and left our tent.

These tears were not for me.

Even among the followers that remained to us, some talked.

“Does he hope to find redemption by taking in the children?”

They might talk, and they might doubt, but Makalaurë’s love was genuine. He pitied the children at first, and was certainly remorseful that his own actions had contributed to the situation the children found themselves in. But as he nurtured them, they also nurtured that in him which he had long kept hidden away. Through them the tender parts of his nature found expression again, and he loved them with all the intensity that burns in our Feanorian blood.

He _cherished_ them.

The little ones were easy to love. Even I, jaded as I was from the loss of my brothers and my other half, softened in the presence of Elrond and Elros.

The hardness in Makalaurë’s spirit was never who he is, but who had become to survive the horrors that would have crushed him. He grew tough, but there remained in him a longing, so poignant to see, that he might one day find peace and be free of the burden of our oath.

And as for redemption, Makalaurë would have scoffed at the idea. He understood the futility of trying to fulfill our oath long before I did. He was not so foolish as to believe that he would be redeemed in the eyes of the Valar by simply doing the right thing and nurturing two innocent children. Though he dreamed of finding peace, he believed us doomed, as I found out when we discussed our plan for reclaiming the Silmarils from Eönwë’s camp.

I had been astonished at his frank claim that Everlasting Dark would indeed be our lot, whether we kept our oath or broke it. Even I, a survivor of Angband and its horrors, had believed that we might still succeed in fulfilling our oath, right up until the flesh on my remaining hand began to burn.

Makalaurë’s brutal honesty was tempered by hope, but he was always prepared to face and accept harsh reality. He adapts, adjusts his expectations, and it is this seemingly cool logic that sometimes gives the impression he feels less than he does. Makalaurë’s strength is rooted in acceptance.

My brother Makalaurë, the softest-hearted out of all of us, the most like our gentle mother, is also the strongest.

Standing now at the end of it all, I see what Makalaurë had always seen, what he’d had the time to process and accept because of his nature. It swamps me, the realization that we were damned from the start, that our cause had always been hopeless, trapped and cursed as we were. It was pure love and loyalty that had bound Makalaurë to my side all this time.

And I failed him in every way.

I had hoped that I could save us from the Darkness. I had hoped to free us all. I had hoped I could free him, my last living brother, and know him again as he’d been before he became haggard by the weight of our burden.

I would have done anything to save them. Anything. Fight, kill, face down all the world to regain what is ours and free us.

But I failed.

Now I press through immense heat to the edge of a fiery chasm, and I watch the shimmering glow of molten earth swirl beneath me. I jump, and I do not know which is more painful: the blinding heat searing my flesh and bones, or the shock of my fëa ripping from my hröar.

But then it is done, and I am free from the ruined shell that had been my body for too long. I do not linger, my spirit fleeing over the cracked and bleeding landscape.

I cannot stay. I cannot bear to see the tears my most beloved brother will shed for me.

These tears are mine, but I cannot be there to wipe them away.


End file.
